Author name: Essjay Peatoo

The next Sunday in Ordinary Time will not be until the feast of Mary, Mother of the Church on June 9.  For the next three months we celebrate the season of Lent, followed by Easter and Eastertide, culminating in the birthday of the Church on Pentecost.  The Lenten season commonly is thought of as a […]

Jesus certainly made strange choices in his selection of Apostles. When we look for “vocations”, we tend to search among committed and well-balanced Christians. But in today’s gospel (Luke 5:27-32) we see Jesus picking someone who was regarded as an immoral money-grabber, a religious outcast. Tax collectors in Jesus’ time were despised on two counts:

Today’s reading from Isaiah (Isaiah 58:1-9) is a magnificent and, in many ways, a frightening passage.  It points to where true religion is to be found.  The call is for an inward spirit to match our outward observances. It is a call that permeates Jesus’ teaching throughout the Gospel and is touched upon in today’s

Through the Desert God Leads us to Freedom Dear brothers and sisters! When our God reveals himself, his message is always one of freedom: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2). These are the first words of the Decalogue

God’s will is to save us, and nothing pleases him more than our coming back to him with true repentance. The heralds of truth and the ministers of divine grace have told us this from the beginning, repeating it in every age. Indeed, God’s desire for our salvation is the primary and pre-eminent sign of

Mardi Gras is strongly associated with wild bacchanalia and debauchery, but the original intent of the holiday, and how it is kept by the faithful, is much different. Fat Tuesday, as it is known in English, is a long-standing tradition of the Catholic Church and it marks the last day of Ordinary Time before the

Today’s reading from Sirach is a call to sinners to repent and to come back to God (Sirach 17:24-29). We are urged to turn back to the Lord, to convert, to pray in his presence, to leave behind our sinful ways and thereby lessen the effects of our wrongdoing. When we truly repent of the

Today we have the continuation of Luke’s sermon on the plane (not the mount) (Luke 6:39-45). Last Sunday’s Gospel told us not to judge or we, ourselves, would be judged. We cannot pass judgment unless we have some vision and understanding. Only God has that vision and understanding.  How can the blind, those without understanding,

Today Sirach speaks of the relationship between the Creator and the human beings he has made (Sirach 17:1-15). It is part of a poem in praise of the Lord for the creation of humankind. The author is following the order in Genesis and has already spoken of the creation of stars, plants and animals. He

Sirach today gives some advice on friendship (Sirach 6:5-17). Friendship was an important concept in social relations during the Hellenistic period and is referred to several times in Sirach (9:10; 11:29-14:2; 22:19-26; 37:1-6). In Greek literature of the time, a friend was one who remained true in times of distress and could, therefore, be trusted